The cloud computing environment is an enhancement to the predecessor grid environment, whereby multiple grids and other computation resources may be further abstracted by a cloud layer, thus making disparate devices appear to an end-user as a single pool of seamless resources. These resources may include such things as physical or logical compute engines, servers and devices, device memory, storage devices.
Currently, it is difficult in cloud computing environments for users to link (or create relationships) among multiple instances so that the change in status of one instance will be reflected in the status of another instance. Linking instance can be especially important when instances rely upon each other. Today, semantic relationships are not captured as part of instance provisioning. Rather, it is the user that often understands the relationships and roles between virtual machines. As such, the user will typically make the changes manually, or monitor and implement some level of automation external to the operating environment.